You are interviewing for a senior SRE role at a regulated broking platform that connects to two exchanges, a clearing member and several market-data vendors, and runs about 200 services. The panel has just described an incident where a known, logged risk was never acted on. They want a story from your own experience about raising a risk that did not get acted on.
The interviewer asks“Tell me about a time you raised a risk and it was ignored or deprioritised. What happened next, and what did you change about how you raise risks?”
I'd tell it as a story about how I framed the risk, not about who ignored it. I raised certificate expiry on our exchange and vendor links as a hygiene task with no date or cost, so it reasonably lost to feature work; I built a basic expiry alert within my own remit, but my inventory was incomplete and a market-data vendor certificate expired, giving us 25 minutes of stale options prices after the open. Afterwards I fixed the problem properly with automated issuance and a complete inventory, and, more importantly, I changed how I raise risks: a risk register with owners and review dates, cost-of-inaction framing, explicit sign-off when a risk is accepted, and pre-mortems before big changes.
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